Making The Decision When Considering Structural Insulation Panels
If the decision is to build with a Structural Insulation Panels, the next choice to make is what kind of panel and what type of insulation.
It All Adds Up - With heating and cooling costs accounting for 50 – 70% of the energy used in your home, a well-insulated building envelope adds directly to “money savings”. Furthermore, keeping the temperatures relatively equal throughout your house adds to your personal comfort. And, in the end, less heating and cooling means less demands on our energy resources and reduced carbon emissions, adding up to a better future.
Insulation Panels Choices
Making The Insulation Panels Choice
What do we talk about more than the weather? Comfort. Stating the obvious, it’s hot outside in the summer and cold outside in the winter. Funny thing is, we don’t really like that. We prefer the temperature to stay pretty steady, varying only a few degrees either way, especially in our homes. Heat, on the other hand, is always trying to warm things up. If it is warm outside, heat tries to work its way into our cooler living spaces. And if it is cold outside, all that heat we pay for and that our furnace works so hard to produce is trying to get outside and warm things up. Insulation is the barrier we use to try to keep heat where we really want it.
Whether we insulate with fiberglass batts, loose fill cellulose, foams that are sprayed or build with an insulation panels, straw bales or even compacted dirt (did you know dirt can insulate?), they all work by limiting the movement of heat. Each has different characteristics and the amount of material required to achieve the same results is based on the insulating material’s R-value, or ability to resist the movement of heat. The higher the R-value, the better the insulating effectiveness.
So Which Kind Is Best? - The most correct answer to that question is, “it depends”. There are a lot of questions that factor into the answer. How much insulation do you want... or need? How much space do you have or do you want to give up? Is availability of the product a factor? Is price a factor? Is there anything else that is a factor?
Comparing The Insulations - When it comes to Structural Insulation Panels or SIPs, in most cases foams are the insulation of choice. In our next post, we will discuss in depth the different types of insulations commonly available in structural insulation panels. We will point out varying characteristics, the associated pros and cons and compare them to other forms of insulation generally used in construction. All this in an effort to assist you in choosing the best type of insulation for your project.
Watch for our next post, and you can learn more about RAY-CORE’s Structural Insulation Panels...
By Email at: info@raycore.com or by Phone: 1.877.552.2440 or…
